Everybody’s got a favorite dystopian vision in the movies. Some like the cyberpunk thing (ex. Blade Runner). Some prefer the post-apocalyptic desert wasteland (ex. the Mad Max movies). Some favor the gone-to-seed urban hellhole (ex. Escape from New York). Some choose the beautiful techno Garden of Eden with something ugly growing inside of it (ex. Logan’s Run, Gattaca). Some enjoy those films where future societies finally admit openly that life is cheap, the old school Romans were right and life-or-death games are exactly what people want and need (ex. Rollerball, Battle Royale).
And those are all great, but my own favorite is the ultra-70s, rape-tastic, psycho screwball, frosty moral decay of A Clockwork Orange. It’s set in a future where the only big bomb that’s gone off are the ticking time-bombs of volatile youth and the sex-crazy human id. All of those 1950s juvenile delinquent films that purported to expose the youth problem—as well as give us cool knife fights and Mamie Van Doren in a tight sweater—tried to warn us about this. It’s only a matter of time before pomade and switchblades become bowler hats and canes, and before smoking reefer and stealing cars become rape sprees in the night, they tried to tell us. In this film, screenwriter/director Stanley Kubrick (adapting the novel by Anthony Burgess) is there, in the imagined future, claiming a spot on the downhill slide and looking out at the dark edge where morality suddenly seems beside the point. Maybe the best reaction is to laugh.
Forty-five years after its making, A Clockwork Orange still inspires some nice arguments. See this at midnight and talk about it until sunrise.
My take: It’s a comedy, out-and-out, through-and-through. The scenario in which a lowlife becomes a celebrated figure in polite society is a comedy staple that goes back to George Bernard Shaw, if not further. This one happens to involve a sociopath, played with sour grace by Malcolm McDowell, who eventually becomes a political pawn through a series of madcap machinations and ironic twists. Still, the term black comedy is almost too tame for it. Rather, A Clockwork Orange is more like a comedy that keeps (intentionally) going too far. It’s a comedy that dares to be unfunny at times (“This show is not about laughter; it’s about comedy“, Andrew Dice Clay says in a quick vulnerable moment on his nerve-wracking stand-up album The Day the Laughter Died, on which he brutalizes and chases out of the room a small club audience at the height of his fame—I’ll never forget that line and it applies here, too). The scene where The droogs break into a writer’s house, beat him crippled, cut off his wife’s clothes with scissors and then rape her is a layered lasagna of humor and horror. It’s a brutal scene, but to the droogs, it’s a real laugh riot. Kubrick runs with that. Malcolm McDowell’s Alex is a comic figure in the scene. He wears a funny nose, dances around, smiles and sings “Singin’ in theRain”. We don’t laugh, but in his mind Alex may as well be Harpo Marx harassing Edgar Kennedy for no reason in Duck Soup. He has no personal vendetta against these people whose lives he’s ruining. He’s just—bored. All he wants is to pop someone’s balloon, whether it’s a drunken beggar in the street, a rival gang in the middle of their own rape or a wealthy couple in a beautiful home. He’s not picky about his victims. The only way to win Alex’s favor, it seems, is to express love for Beethoven.
Every good comedy, after all, is full of jerks and that’s all you’ll find here.
The boldest joke is when one of Alex’s victims becomes a comic figure himself. Kubrick drove actor Patrick Magee up the wall directing him to overact more and more, chew up the set to crumbs, as the wheelchair-bound writer who froths at his chance to get revenge on Alex after he finds him in a sorry state years after the original crime. Magee shakes enough to mix paint, glares like he’s in a silent movie and puts bizarre inflections on his lines (“Try the wine!”). See this in a theater today and Magee gets laughs, even when the audience knows that they probably shouldn’t be laughing.
This is an ugly film beautifully made, which makes it captivating even when it’s bitter as old coffee. Stanley Kubrick’s mad attention to detail glows from every frame. Its bad guys are awful and its good guys are worse. Its only rays of light are what manages to shine through the overcast English sky. Its portrait of humanity is bleak, sad, disturbing and godless.
Now that’s comedy!